Decapitated Poetry

Winner of the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

Poems from a boisterously out and open queer voice from Taiwan.

Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being. Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry, this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.

When Shadows Evade Shadows: Wen-chi Li on Ko-Hua Chen and Taiwan’s Tongzhi Literature. Click here to read the interview on Asymptote.

‘Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell have brought the two strains of Chen’s oeuvre into a dynamic tension, and their illuminating translators’ foreword reflects on the “fascinating interplay between queer identity and technology.” Though the content is so widely disparate, both halves of this volume contain the same vital assertions of selfhood.’—Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation. Click here to read the full review.